Today we introduce you to Dr. Clyde Gray Culbertson. This story is about Dr. Culbertson’s amazing medical history and of his journey through Indiana University, and how he changed the teaching methods at IU. At the end of the interview, you will be surprised to learn where Dr. Culbertson lived during much of his medical pathology experiences and accomplishments with IU. This interview, by Dick Reid, appeared in the Brown County Democrat, September 4, 1974.
Clyde Culbertson is a lifelong Hoosier whose medical degree led him eventually into public health research as a world-known pathologist, much of whose life is spent at the top end of a microscope.
At the other end of the instrument are his closest associates — tiny amoebas.
Some of us had a fleeting exposure to them (then introduced as amoebae) in biology classes. And many of us, not including Clyde, learned we could take ‘em or leave ‘em-preferably the later.
Amoebas were not always paramount to Dr. Culbertson, either.
Clyde Gray Culbertson was born July 27, 1906, at Vevay, Ind., (pronounced Veevy). It’s an Ohio River town, county seat of Switzerland County, located about 20 miles east of Madison.
His father was Carl S. Culbertson and his mother Anna Mary Gray Culbertson, better known as Molly.
Carl was a high school dropout, in today’s terminology. But he only knew that schooling interfered with the things he wanted to do, such as horse trading. Carl also farmed, worked in timber, lumber, coal and farm supply businesses, became a real estate agent, road builder in Kentucky and ran a flour mill now known as the City Roller Mills. It’s right in back of the courthouse in Vevay.
Clyde was one of four children born to Carl and Molly Culbertson. He has a sister Captain Mary Eloise Culbertson, who recently retired as chief nurse at the VA Hospital in Louisville. His other sister, Mrs. Grace Robinson of Cincinnati, is also a nurse. And his brother, Carl S. Culbertson, Jr. is another pathologist. Seven years younger than Clyde, Carl has retired as head of the South Bend, Ind., medical foundation. One of Grace’s two sons is likewise a doctor.
Clyde was educated at Vevay and Indiana University. He earned his bachelor’s degree in 1928 and his M.D. in 1931. At IU Clyde worked as a student assistant to professors and as class instructor to help pay his way. He also worked nights in the Methodist Hospital lab.
After graduation he was selected to set up and put into operation the first central clinical laboratory at the medical school, under direction of medical school dean Dr. Willis Gatch. Dr. Gatch attained that position the same year, 1931, that Clyde was graduated from medical school.
It was also the same year he married Margaret O’Neill, who was born in Downs, Ill., but had lived in Brightwood most of her life. She was an instructor in nursing education at General Hospital when the two met. The couple have no children.
One of the first major decisions of the new dean was to bring the school’s own central clinical laboratories into being. It was on a Sunday in June, of 1931 that he took young Dr. Culbertson into the university bookstore, located in what is now Emerson Hall. After looking it over, Dr. Gatch told Clyde, “I’m going on two weeks’ vacation tomorrow. You come out here tomorrow and tell them what you want to do.”
Clyde started planning the lab of his own design on the following day and had it operating under his own command in September, just three months later. At first the facility was known as central laboratory. It has grown (after a number of moves and expansions) into the present IU department of clinical pathology. Pathology is oversimplified in the dictionary as “the study of the causes and nature of disease.”
Dr. Culbertson worked at the medical school from 1931 until 1946. During depression days of the thirties, when skilled help was almost impossible to get and staffs were never at full strength, Clyde not only ran the central lab, he also taught laboratory work to students in surgical pathology, performed laboratory studies for hospital patients and headed the Red Cross blood donor service during World War II. In that capacity alone, Clyde had 24 nurses and four doctors under his charge. He drew as many as “600” bloods a day.
It was a dedicated group. Some assistants worked for as little as $90 a month, compared with $300 per month they could have earned outside. Dr. Culbertson finally got those token salaries more into line with reality. During Paul McNutt’s administration as governor, the state health department head was discharged. Clyde G. Culbertson was named to succeed him, and the good doctor faced still another responsibility—that of making his lab serve both the university and the state for a number of years.
Clyde now supervised a staff of 100 and worked seven days a week, 14 to 16 hours a day.
To be continued.
Submitted by Pauline Hoover
Brown County Historical Society, Inc.
